


eyeline

by Ias



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Jealousy, Pining, Requited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 15:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8061298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: glance (n): 1) a quick or brief look.2) a gleam or flash of light, especially reflected light.3) a deflected movement or course; an oblique rebound.





	

This is a love story told in a series of glances.

After the world went sour, how could there be time for more? People die fast and bad and loveless, and live much the same. So there’s not much time for more than looks, as sharp as desert sunlight flashing on chrome, and if that’s not what love looks like, it’s not like Toast knows the difference.

So maybe it isn’t a love story at all.

So here’s how it starts. Toast looks at Furiosa, and Furiosa looks at Angharad.

A beginning. If it wasn’t a bitter one, Toast might not know what to do with it.

But this she does know; how to bite down on the anger and the hatred until it’s a bit in her mouth, watching Furiosa and Angharad arguing on those rare nights that Miss Giddy can smuggle her in, pacing and arguing in cut-off whispers as the rest of the wives huddle outside the bedroom, listening in to their fates being weighed. They will have a choice in the end: go, or stay. A choice which will be no choice at all. 

Toast sees the fire in Angharad’s eyes, the way she stands tall even when Furiosa tells her she knows nothing of how to survive, and then bites back her words just as quickly. Angharad is a god, and Toast loves her with every ounce of her devotion. But Angharad is also a woman, and Toast envies her, wants to crawl inside her skin just like the child just beginning to bulge from her belly. Furiosa looks at her, war-hardened and half-mad and dripping atrocities like phantom blood from her metal arm, and she sees something more than the pampered slave-pet-thing she might have expected. She sees a leader. An equal. And they talk, and talk, and talk about the choice they’re making for everyone else.

 _I am not a child_ , Toast wants to shout in Furiosa’s face. _I can fight._ But even children fight these days, so what does that mean? Perhaps what she wants to say is that she can fuck. But again. Meaningless. Furiosa wants neither from her. Her eyes move over her without seeing, move towards Angharad.

It’s to Angharad she hands the gun, demands a reload from one who had hardly ever touched something meant to kill. Toast knows how to load a gun and she yanks it from Angharad’s hands, as if she could pull the love away just as easily—but it’s not like she knows anything about _that._ Toast is reliable. She can put bullets in Furiosa’s gun. She is one to be trusted but not one to be loved.

And then Angharad dies. And so does the green place. And Furiosa’s eyes don’t look at anything anymore—not until her eyes turn back to the citadel, and the fury road that lies between.

She looks as Toast is pulled from the rig by a polecat’s arms around her waist, kicking and screaming and _useless_ , just as they all thought she’d be; Furiosa’s head snaps to her and she screams, throws her arm out as if she can pull her back across that terrible distance, growing wider by the second. _Good,_ Toast thinks above the terror. _Let her watch me die. I’ll do that before I go back._

Toast doesn’t die. In the sweltering stench of Joe’s car, her face pressed to the window glass, she sees the knife go into Furiosa’s side. She sees Furiosa’s cry of agony, sees her hunched over the wheel with one arm out the window, trying to save everyone, as always, as always—and that’s when her eyes go back to Toast, meeting them through the window of the car, hers full of pain and defeat and Toast’s wet with the tears she promised she’d never cry again. Maybe that’s when Toast realizes it for the first time, but maybe she knew it sooner.

Joe is dead. They are alive. And Toast finds her not in the medical ward or among the wild celebrations, but back where she started: in her old bunk in the imperator quarters. It’s silent in there; Toast walks quietly, and Furiosa sits on the edge of her bed and doesn’t say a word. She keeps her eyes to the ground until Toast is standing right in front of her. Then she looks up. And Toast thinks that maybe this could be a love story after all.


End file.
